Trapped in the Creation Museum

January 20, 2008|BY STEPHEN T. ASMA and Stephen T. Asma, is a philosophy professor at Columbia College Chicago and the author of "Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums" (Oxford University Press).

Into the swampy debate over evolution has waded the new Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Ky. In an America divided between those who accept Darwin's theories and those who believe God created the world in six days, it seeks to win moderates and compromisers over to its side. Shortly after the museum opened last spring, I made a pilgrimage to witness this quirky new spectacle of Americana.

Driving the six hours from Chicago to the museum was, in itself, a kind of espionage sortie in the American culture wars. The culture shock goes both ways, and I'm sure that natives of the rural heartlands also feel like they're entering enemy territory when they roll up to the urban jungle.

FOR THE RECORD - This story contains corrected material, published Jan. 20, 2008.

Just as the skyscrapers recede in the rearview, the radio acquires considerably more twang--and more sincerity too. The music loses all the tongue-in-cheek irony of urban college rock and the cynical posturing of hip-hop. It becomes heartfelt, strident, almost embarrassingly earnest.

Suddenly, around Hebron, Ind., there are eight or nine Christian stations pumping out a combination of power ballads--"You are my one redeemer"--personal inspirational confessions and conservative talk shows. By the time I get to Petersburg I feel like I'm in a foreign country. A giant billboard off Highway 275, underwritten by the Creation Museum, commands me to "Prepare to Believe."

Inside the $33 million museum, I am immediately confronted by a startling animatronic scene: a small girl playing next to a dinosaur which, according to the fossil record, went extinct some 60 million years before humans arrived. This is the first of a series of exhibits designed to refute the idea that the Earth is billions of years old.

The evangelical museum is an offshoot of Answers in Genesis (AiG), which is run by Ken Ham, who holds a degree in applied science from the University of Queensland in Australia. He is author of such titles as "The Lie: Evolution" and "Walking Through Shadows: Finding Hope in a World of Pain." AiG also produces a creationist magazine, and a variety of Christian DVDs, CDs and other media.

The promotional material on the AiG Web site states: "Almost all natural history museums proclaim an evolutionary, humanistic worldview. For example, they will typically place dinosaurs on an evolutionary timeline millions of years before man. AiG's museum will proclaim the authority and accuracy of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation . . . ."

After the foyer animatronics, I am shuttled into a high-tech movie theater to watch "Men in White," intended to be a spoof of the Hollywood film "Men in Black." Here the hip sunglass-wearing protagonists are actually archangels Michael and Gabriel ("Mike" and "Gabe").

Science is represented by teachers espousing such "dubious" doctrines as geology, evolution, fossil-dating methodology, and basic cosmology. They are all vanquished by the lovable, wise-cracking Mike and Gabe, while the audience is thumped and rocked by motorized theater chairs and even sprayed with water during the Flood sequence.

The other displays culminate in a film about Jesus' sacrifice for mankind. Along the way, visitors walk inside a scaled-down section of Noah's ark and are told that pornography, suicide and abortion are on the rise due to evolution's nihilism.

It takes two to three hours to tour the "Seven Cs, in God's Eternal Plan": Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross and Consummation. And there is no way to break off at any point. About two hours in, I decide to pause for a visit to the cafeteria, but when I attempt to backtrack, I find that the doors I've been going through have no handles on the opposite side.

IN MANY WAYS, it's not quite accurate to call this center a museum at all. It contains almost no factual information, unless you count speculations on how Noah kept dinosaurs on the ark as information. It offers no new observations about nature, unless inferring the existence of a Designer can be called observational. And, unlike most nature museums, it has no research component.

But perhaps the main problem with the museum is that it implicitly endorses the terms of debate set up by creationists--that it is God and goodness vs. Darwin and evil.

Mainstream museums and scientists need to point out that the creationists' focus on Darwin is a red herring. Creationism is not just contrary to one Victorian gentleman's theory of nature, but in fact goes against all of modern geology, astrophysics, biochemistry, genetics and so on.

The argument also should be made that many forms of religion, Christianity included, are compatible with science in general and Darwinism in particular. Once the debate is framed accurately, Creationism begins to appear less an alternative to evolutionary theory and more like religious doctrine dressed up as science.